Hatred and bigotry is not the exclusive domain of gentiles but you won’t get that commonsense in this hysteria from Chaim Shalev, for whom Jews are always victims and goyim who believe they have group interests are nasty:
The campaign was even harsher than anyone had predicted. After being told by his advisers that there simply wasn’t enough time to win over enough African, Hispanic or Asian Americans, Donald Trump went for broke, in an effort to secure the 72% of the white vote that he would need in order to stand a chance of winning the ballot in November. “The War of the Races,” was how some pundits described it.
Trump did not play his race cards openly, though some viewed his ambiguous statements as stoking the flames. When he changed his famous slogan to “Making the Real America Really Great Again,” minority leaders said they sensed a threat. When he dismissed the sporadic violence that broke out in Alabama between white supremacists and African Americans as “a legit argument,” liberal newspapers were nothing less than outraged. When a New Mexico mob attacked a family of illegal immigrants, Trump said that would no longer happen once the wall went up and “Mexico paid for it.” He used the same tactic when a series of mosques were burned in cities across America, saying that tempers would cool off once the temporary freeze on allowing Muslims to enter the United States as well as the partial ban on Muslim travel between states without a special permit would go into effect.
Most American Jews tried to steer clear of the whole meshugas. They gravitated almost by default towards the Democrats, but didn’t feel the urge to stand out among the many liberal leaders as well as prominent Christian clergymen protesting the increasingly ugly atmosphere of the campaign. Some of the rhetoric on the radical left, which often included incitement against whites as well as anti-Israel propaganda, made them feel no less uncomfortable than the vitriol emanating from the right.
But then reports started to appear of Trump rallies in which Stars of David were painted alongside the Muslim crescent on placards, with big exes on both.
“I didn’t see anything of the sort, you reporters are such liars,” Trump said, even when shown several anti-Jewish signs being waved right under his eyes in a mass meeting in Cincinnati. Confronted at a press conference in late September with several flyers containing caricatures of George Soros, Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson as the three wise monkeys, which had been handed out at the entrance to his Chicago event, Trump blew his top. “And how many of you are Jews anyway?” he asked the shocked reporters. “Let’s see a show of hands here, c’mon folks,” he said, adding his punch line after a short pause, “because if you don’t we can always pull down your pants and find out.” The crowd that had been invited to serve as Trump’s audience burst out in appreciative laughter.
Things then went from bad to worse. Ultra-Orthodox supporters of Trump, who were persuaded by Rick Perry that Trump meant well for religious people everywhere, were driven out of a GOP meeting near Albany, accompanied by curses, shoves and several people waving their right hands in what seemed like Nazi salutes. Then Trump’s running mate told a frenzied crowd in El Paso that “Bloooomental and Schoooooomer” were ganging up on Trump to prevent America being great again “because the New York establishment wants to suck us dry.” Finally, asked to respond to a New York Times report about the hundred of millions of dollars that had been reportedly pouring in to Democratic coffers from distressed Jewish donors, Trump said: “The Jews don’t give me money because they know I can’t be bought. So they’re doing everything they can to destroy me. We’ll see how to deal with this thing once I’m in office, but I promise you, it won’t be pleasant.”
Trump was lambasted by all the major news outlets, and even Fox News said his statement was “superfluous and inflammatory.” The Republican candidate’s campaign advisers were close to hysteria, convinced that such an incendiary statement, coming less than 72 hours before the polls opened, could doom the New York billionaire’s bid for the White House. On Election Day, Jews indeed joined Hispanics and African Americans in breaking all known records for voter participation, but so did white Americans all across the country. Trump was trounced in major blue states such as California, New York and New Jersey, but he received over 80% of the white vote in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, and won the elections with a handy majority in both popular and electoral votes.
He asked Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio to accompany him to his inauguration and refused to rescind the invitations to the inaugural ball that his advisers claimed had been sent “by mistake” to David Duke and several other white supremacists. Pat Buchanan, Trump’s transition team announced, would serve as “special White House adviser.”
This is when Jewish panic went into overdrive. Though the overwhelming majority said that Trump would probably moderate himself and “where would we go anyway,” others, especially on the liberal left, were swept away in the general hysteria that gripped most Democrats. “Our complacency is like that of Jews in Germany in the 1930s” one distressed Jewish leader told a dumbfounded Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. “When our grandparents comforted themselves after Hitler and the Nazis came to power by asking ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ Todd wanted to follow up, but the words seemed to stick in his throat so he frantically signaled to go to commercial break.
